L.A. Metro Is a Crime-Ridden Hellscape
The transit system’s refusal to enforce fares has turned the trains over to criminals.
Every day, thousands of Los Angelenos take a deep breath, step out of their houses, and plunge themselves into a transit experience straight out of Mad Max. The city’s buses have become rolling homeless shelters, replete with drugs and feces. Its trains are home to murder and mayhem. As Daquan, a daily rider who works near the North Hollywood station told us, “You could kill somebody down there and just get away with it.”
The transformation has been swift and stark. Between 2020 and 2025, crime in the system more than doubled. What drove the change? L.A. Metro’s dedication to creating an equitable transit system, where all Angelenos—drug-addicted, homicidal maniacs included—can effectively ride free, without consequences.
In other words, Angelenos have been condemned to die underground, all in the name of racial justice.
Activists and their allies in city government have spent years laser-focused on driving cops from the L.A. Metro’s buses and trains. Their argument: making people pay to use the trains is racist.
Helming this effort was the Labor Community Strategy Center, its offshoot the Bus Riders Union, and a wider coalition of activists. The center believed that, at root, Metro’s fare-enforcement policies were designed to create a “sterile lily white rail experience,” as its black indigenous and “[q]ueer” co-director, Channing Martinez, put it. Martinez hoped to pressure Metro, a “South African Apartheid pass system,” to institute free fares, abolish the transit court system, and nullify the L.A. Sheriff’s long-held ability to enforce fares aboard the trains.
In November 2016, the Labor Community Strategy Center filed a civil rights complaint claiming that L.A. Metro was “systematically targeting Black riders.” Black riders, they alleged, made up less than 20 percent of riders but received at least half of all citations. As a remedy, the center proposed (emphasis removed) that Metro remove all police and fare-collection staff, institute “[p]olicies of reparation” for black riders, and put an “immediate end to all fare collection.”
Less than a month later, L.A. Metro’s Board of Advisors unanimously demanded that Metro create a plan that would “completely decriminalize fare evasion amongst youth transit users” and ensure that youth fare evaders not be “required to interact with law enforcement.” Board members specifically singled out “[y]outh of color” who, they said, were “disproportionately cited for fare evasion.” Founding Metro board member Mark Ridley-Thomas, one of the members who proposed the idea, said the motion would address the “long-standing problem of criminalizing this segment of the population.”
Then, the dam broke. In early 2017, L.A. Metro approved a plan to remove the county sheriff’s department’s exclusive patrol authority, shifting more than half of its former duties to the Los Angeles and Long Beach police departments. Metro itself took over fare-enforcement duties in 2017, formally removed those duties from law enforcement agencies’ contracts in 2022, and, at some point, apparently told the police to focus on “hard crime” instead.
Almost immediately, Metro slashed fare enforcement. In 2016, when the sheriff’s office enforced the fares, officers typically performed between 500,000 and 1,000,000 fare checks per month. In 2018, based on publicly available data, Metro averaged fewer than 300,000 fare checks per month. In 2019, that average fell to a staggering 63,000 checks per month. Finally, in March 2020, L.A. Metro’s bus system suspended fare collection altogether as a Covid precaution until 2022—which conditioned riders to a free system.
Today, Metro hardly enforces fares. Agents conducted only about 5,000 fare checks per month in 2025, down almost 100 percent since 2016. In 2020, Metro instated a “Fareless System Initiative Task Force” to examine how a fare-free system could advance equity. “Equity is very, very important to us,” former Metro CEO Phil Washington said.
In short: activists demanded that L.A. Metro make fares free. And now, with hardly any legal pressure, the city has effectively done it.
Free fares inevitably mean one thing: crime. The system is a hellscape drenched in human feces, where riders are subject to verbal or physical threats, open needles, and screaming homeless people. One million people must contend with the system every day—including some who have been brutalized on buses, trains, and platforms.
Take, for example, Mirna Soza Arauz, a 67-year-old grandmother who was fatally stabbed in the throat by a deranged homeless man named Elliot Nowden. Soza was on her way home from an overnight shift at a local burger restaurant when Nowden attacked her from behind. She managed to exit the train at the Universal City Station with blood gushing from her neck. Nowden stole Soza’s bag and ran.
It wasn’t Nowden’s first Metro offense. He was banned from riding Metro trains in 2019 after stabbing a college student in the chest on the Expo Line—a ban evidently not enforced. In February 2024, he was arrested for an assault at the same Red Line station where he would stab Soza two months later.
Months ago, we submitted a records request with L.A. Metro demanding surveillance footage of Soza’s murder. Metro delayed the request for weeks before ultimately determining that releasing the footage was not in the “public interest.” Soza’s family disagrees. Her three children signed a consent letter allowing Metro to release the video of their mother’s stabbing—which would allow the public to see what Metro tries to hide. L.A. Metro has still not provided the video, against the Soza family’s wishes.
Similarly, Jesse Rodriguez was stabbed to death two weeks before his 24th birthday on the Red Line in September 2023. According to Rodriguez’s family, police said the attacker was having a “mental health crisis” when he stabbed Rodriguez once in the heart with a hunting knife. L.A. Metro denied our request for surveillance footage of Rodriguez’s stabbing.
These aren’t the only horror stories. In February 2024, 63-year-old Darryl Winborn was pepper-sprayed to death on a Metro bus in Koreatown; in June 2024, a 38-year-old father of four who rode Metro daily was shot in the head and killed; in August 2024, a woman was brutally assaulted around 5:30 a.m. when a man allegedly beat her and threw her onto the tracks at the Allen Metro station, leaving her disfigured with a broken nose and multiple broken bones. There are many more incidents.
As its system deteriorates, L.A. Metro has done everything but restore law enforcement. In 2020, Metro’s board moved to “re-envision transit safety” with a reactionary post–George Floyd peace guard known as the Metro Ambassadors. Clad in neon-green Metro shirts, the ambassadors are meant to be a “visible, uniformed presence” to “deter” crime and administer NARCAN. According to a December 2025 report by UCLA researchers, the unarmed ambassadors have been threatened at gunpoint, sexually assaulted, punched, and kicked in the ribs.
L.A. Metro is also in the process of establishing an in-house public safety team, which will hire and deploy its own law-enforcement officers alongside ambassadors and crisis-intervention teams by 2029. Through Metro’s Care-Based Services Division, crisis teams aim to “reduce reliance on traditional law enforcement,” Metro says. The system has also replaced some old lights with new LED lights; played classical music at 72 decibels (the sound of a vacuum) at a dangerous station; and built some taller fare gates. When we rode the trains, the police officers we saw didn’t even appear to have digital scanners to check if riders pay at the fare gates.
“Usually, you might see the LAPD get on board the train and say, kind of halfheartedly, ‘okay, everyone pull out your TAP cards,’” Enforce the Fares member Alex Davis told us. “You can pull out basically any card and as long as you pull out a plastic card and kind of wave it around, the cops won’t do anything.”
Obviously, none of this is working. Between 2017 and 2025, crime more than doubled. Adjusting for ridership, battery and aggravated assaults both increased by more than 100 percent, and narcotics offenses rose by more than 800 percent.
The lawlessness starts at the entrance: about half of L.A. Metro riders don’t pay, according to data analyzed by Davis. By comparison, Metro’s fare-evasion rate was between 3 percent and 7 percent across stations in 2007. Most importantly, more than 90 percent of violent criminals on the Metro evade fares, meaning the sort of people who go on to stab old ladies in the neck could have been caught by fare enforcement, but aren’t. Despite L.A. Metro’s numerous pilot programs and quasi-safety measures, the one method proven to work for the system is the one method board members are reluctant to try: classic policing.
L.A. Metro’s years’ long anti-racist, anti-law enforcement experiment has also cost the city millions of dollars in unpaid fares. With a fare-evasion rate of about 50 percent, Metro could be raking in double what it collects; at least an extra $86 million per year. That’s a small fraction of Metro’s nearly $9 billion operating budget. But the lawlessness Metro has encouraged over the past few years undercuts the very “basis for Metro’s continued taxpayer support,” Davis said.
While Metro’s board constructs its progressive dream world, the system’s ridership, the majority of whom are low-income people who rely on public transit to live and commute, are getting shot, stabbed, and assaulted.
What would it take to bring back fare enforcement? According to local pro-safety activists, not much. As of 2023, L.A. Metro employs an existing force of over 200 Transit Security Officers, who could easily fare-check 20,000 passengers per day. “That’s clearly the biggest lever we have to pull in order to improve safety,” Davis said. “Why not do the one thing that we have evidence was very effective when it was happening?”
L.A. Metro’s ideological commitment to transit equity appears to stand in the way between a safer Metro and more dead Angelenos. In fact, Metro has a recent example to prove that fare compliance reduces disorder. In the summer of 2024, Metro tried a Tap to Exit program that resulted in a 40 percent reduction in crime and other incidents at the North Hollywood B Line station. When Metro paused that program briefly in April 2025, “reported incidents”—primarily involving “homelessness, unsanitary conditions, and destination-less riders”—shot up 116 percent at Union Station (another B Line location) and 67 percent at North Hollywood.
Many of the crime statistics in this story are based on L.A. Metro’s public database. Sometime after June 3, Metro appears to have removed over 4,600 incidents from that database, mostly from 2017 and 2018. Our figures reflect those updates. We asked Metro why they removed thousands of crimes from their records and whether the online database was the most accurate source for crime statistics. They did not respond to either question or to our request for comment on the story.
Americans were horrified when Ukrainian immigrant Iryna Zarutska was brutally murdered on a Charlotte, North Carolina light-rail train. It was a wake-up call to the country that something has gone terribly wrong if random bystanders are being slain on public transportation systems.
In L.A. Metro’s case, that “something” is an easily identifiable variable: the complete absence of fare enforcement and crime deterrence.
Christopher F. Rufo is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of America’s Cultural Revolution. Haley Strack is an investigative reporter at City Journal.
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Great investigative reporting. Do Bass and Raman voters even ride the metro or know anything about how crime ridden it is? Spencer is continuing to shine the light on the communists. Palisades has been abandoned with no police patrols at night. Perhaps World Cup fans are getting a preview of the inevitable Olympics disaster in 2028.
Welcome to Canada where criminals, meth heads, and homeless seem to have the right to go anywhere at anytime and commit all sorts of crimes including sexual assault on buses, subways, and streetcars, without paying a cent, and drivers are threatened with being fired if they intervene.